April 21, 2008

Japanese onomatopoeia is incredibly cool. But if you don't already know, can you figure out which of the 2 words above is supposed to sound like "many small things gathered together and moving, such as a swarm of insects or a crowd of people seen from a distance" and which is supposed to sound like "doing something difficult on purpose, even though there is no need to, such as swimming across a river instead of taking the bridge"?

I'm glad there are words for these things at all, whether they seem truly onomatopoetic or not. Let's just adopt the Japanese words. No need to anglicize. This isn't like the way there are endless versions of how a dog bark or a cock's crow gets transliterated in different languages. People knew they needed those words before they noticed that other languages spelled the sound differently. The Japanese originated the desire for words that sounded like many small things moving together and doing something difficult but unnecessary on purpose. We see their words at the same time we first think we want such words, so waza waza and uja uja it is.

All you can object is that the use of the thing must be very narrowly to remind and not to inform. And after all most people use dictionaries in order to be informed. Even inside England probably the majority of users do it, and the dictionaries are used widely by foreigners with little knowledge of English. For that matter the same principle is used far too much in interlingual dictionaries ; I remember opening the standard pocket Japanese-English one and finding against some characters only

``An inch of steel, the merest of a weapon.''

This blank verse line is as ``living'' as could be, and in most cases would lead into absurdity any unfortunate man who copied it out. What he needs is as nearly as possible the opposite ; something that would warn him of possible absurdities when writing English, and of the unexpected tricks that may be being played by an English author in his reading.

There are four taste elements- sweet, sour, salty, bitter. This has been the case for centuries. All cooking and eating revolves around those four elements. Over the past several years a fifth element has arisen; umami- from the Japanese root meaning delicious. Umami has no direct English translation.

Umami is much harder to discern as it can be used to describe characteristics savory, meatiness, or richness of a dish or food.

I would not use it around certain people though. It could be confused with yo mamma.

Making up new words for everything is stupid. It wastes the combinatorial power of language, through which an infinity of meanings can be expressed by combining old words in new ways. It's the same kind of stupid as using thousands of characters to represent written words instead of an alphabet. That's why it takes the Japanese forever to learn to read and write their own language.

Let's not forget that according to the Japanese, breasts have a sound effect; this is where "furi kuri" comes from.

No . . . the sound effect for breasts is "boin." Furikuri is just a Gainax anime.

Re: Waza waza and uja uja, I'm not sure that waza waza is really intended to be onomatopoeic. The uja uja isn't really a swarm of insects buzzing, though. The word used in the Japanese caption on the Language Log post is actually "ugomeku," (as ugomeiteiru) which is more like "writhing" or "squirming" than just moving or buzzing. I think that communicates that it's creepy crawlies, rather than what you'd think of as a swarm. "Moving" would have been ugoiteiru.

Another Japanese sound effect I like is the sound of silence -- shin. Usually, in comics, drawn out across the length of the background, like し～～～～ん.

(For the studio audience, FLCL is a somewhat experimental show which drops into "animated comics" for about five or ten minutes, at which point some of the sketchier characters go off on a riff on the name of the show, rattling through about a half-dozen onomatopoeic definitions of what it might mean, almost all of them dubious or dirty.)

Mangaka are endlessly fecund when it comes to sound effects, and there's lots of pornographic manga with a crying need for sonic descriptions of breasts. It's got to be the Eskimos' terms-for-snow of eromanga.